Olaudah Equiano and the Price Already Paid

In 1766, a young African man named Olaudah Equiano stood on a dock in Montserrat, West Indies, clutching forty pounds sterling — every coin he had scraped together through years of careful trading on the side. He handed the money to his master, Robert King, and purchased what no human being should ever have to buy: ownership of his own body.

Equiano had been kidnapped from his Nigerian village at age eleven, shipped across the Atlantic in chains, and sold three times before he was twenty. He knew what it meant to have someone else claim authority over his flesh — to be told where to go, what to do, whom to serve.

But when Equiano later embraced the Christian faith, he encountered a staggering truth in Paul's letter to the Corinthians: "You are not your own; you were bought at a price." For a man who had literally been bought and sold, these words cut differently. This was no transaction of exploitation. This was a purchase of restoration. The God who made his body had redeemed it — not to enslave him again, but to declare him a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Equiano spent the rest of his life using that same body to fight the slave trade, testifying before Parliament, writing his autobiography, honoring God with every breath in his lungs.

Paul's words remind us: we too have been purchased. The question is whether we will live like we still belong to the old master — or like someone whose body has been claimed for glory.